No Accidents With Guns, No Accidental Fascism, either. (American Revelation, One Shots: Duante Wright Edition.)

The spear in the other's heart is the spear in your own.
You are he.

There is no other wisdom, and no other hope for us but that we grow wise.

~Surak, Vulcan philosopher, as quoted in the Star Trek novel Spock's World, by Diane Duane.

There was another police-involved shooting in a suburb of Minneapolis last night. 20-year old Duante Wright was shot by police during a routine traffic stop, for all intents and purposes there's no damned reason for it. 

And now, the defense they've settled on per the town's police chief, is that the officer intended to draw and fire his Taser but accidentally drew his gun and fired it instead, mortally wounding the kid, who then tried to drive away and made it only a short distance before he died.. 

Speaking as a veteran here, and as somebody who served in a specialty code that's trained on tasers (a process which also requires you be tased, by the way) I'm not even sure how it was even possible for this to have happened as the police chief described it..

Firstly, there are no accidents with guns. There is only proper use or negligence. Secondly, an officer's Taser is carried on his off-hand side, for a reason. Specifically, so that shit like this doesn't happen. And thirdly, firearms and Tasers work in fundamentally different ways, such that it should be impossible for there to be any confusion involving the two.

Alleged incompetence is, thus, not the defense these assholes think it is.

But it's certainly of a piece with these fucking people's bumble-fuck attempts at fascism, lately.

It fits just fine with their open pushing of White Supremacy, per no less of a conservative media outlet than Fox News, and no less of a media personality than Tucker Carlson, who was trying to claim last week that Democrats are trying to "Replace" white people. I'm not sure how that works when the Democratic President is an old white man and so are a lot of the Democrats in the House and the Senate.

But then, to these people the excuse that "They're being replaced" is something they've been braying since anybody else besides wealthy white conservative men had political representation at all.

Then people have the balls to wonder why there's murders and violence toward those they consider "enemies?"

And it's funny how none of these people want to directly claim this shit, and just how full of deniability and weasel words it all is. They know it's wrong, but they want to try it anyway.

And then these gutless fucks get mad when there's opposition to their bullshit. You know, the shitty agenda they're only now beginning to speak about in public.

I'm tired of the killing, I'm tired of the racism.

But I'm even sicker of the Republicans and their propagation of this bullshit for political gain.

Just as there are no accidents with firearms, there are no accidental pushes for fascism. Republicans may not have the guts to claim their bullshit now, but they're hoping they can lull people to go back to sleep or ignore it all so we wake up one day in a society dominated by marching soldiers and cops who strut around like old Soviet KGB agents because they're used to doing as they damn well please as the Sword and Shield Of The Party. And then when faced with whatever public outrage is allowed, Republicans want to be like "Oops, somebody pushed the wrong button on the time machine" as if they can "Aw-shucks" their way out of facing even the most muted consequences for their fascistic bullshit. Republicans already want you to pretend that the Trump years, 1/6 and their continued outrages against academic freedom, freedom of speech and voting are somebody else's fault, or some kind of fortunate (for them) accident. They want to stack the deck in plain sight, and then have everybody else pretend to believe them when they say they won.

The absolute truth is, they want to push for elite rule, end democracy, and offer the populace the bread and circuses of culture war crap and racist cruelty instead of having a decent life and a say in their own country.

At least I'm not the only one. In the snipped Tweets here, well, last week it popped up on my timeline, with both Charlotte Clymer and Tea Party Joe Walsh ripping conservative author JD Vance a new one.

I damned near shit myself, at the idea that those two could or would agree on anything. But this is where we're at right now as a country. What few decent conservatives and remaining Republicans there are...are on the same side as LGBT activists, simply for the sake of our national survival. Right now the number of people identifying as Democrats is probably the highest it's been in 30 years. There's a reason for that.

Current Republicans want to live in a world where you have to give them money, and you have no recourse, and if they didn't have any enemies or political opposition to rail against to make their voters be afraid, they'd invent it, whole-cloth out of thin air if need be. And they'll gin up whatever combination of incompetence and fear it takes to make a real body count to make it seem like there's some kind of a war out there which justifies the unaccountable power they want to claim.

And no, they literally do not give a fuck how many innocent people die in the process.

They don't give a shit if Americans are blowing each other into chunky spaghetti all over the landscape with military weapons and dividing the country up by factions, so long as their debased entertainment, personal power and wealth is untouched by the conflict. In fact, they might even encourage such a war if they might gain even a little more power and wealth because of it.

I don't want to live in their world, and I used to be a Republican. 

Do you?

Do you think Josh Hawley would cut the shit, stop blaming "woke" people for everything, cut out the racism and work for unity in the face of a threat?

Hell no, he'd be working to expand the power of the State to implement his ideas of nanny-state fascism for the "benefit" of the constituents he appears to regard as at best, a rationalization, or perhaps nice pets.

But who, ultimately, he wishes to turn into nothing more than peons and serfs serving himself.

Do you think somebody like Matt Gaetz would curtail his hedonistic lifestyle or stop fucking teenage girls because there was a war on?

Bullshit. He'd sit there on the couch watching Fox News coverage of it while getting a blowjob, all the while being certain that the money and the power and the sex were both the reward for and the proof of his rightness. 

Hell, I'd argue at this point that they've even gone beyond Donald Trump. All he was, was a distraction, a rationalization. Most of these fucking people always were this bad. They just were looking for something, anything, to signal that it was Okay to show it.

Trump riled up the mob and got them baying for ever more blood, and then made no effort to control it. This is where we are now. This is who these people are, and always were. They've run out damned near all the other Republicans who ever were anything else.

And the Evangelicals did the same thing in their churches and online spaces, I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.

These people don't want to lead, they want to rule, and to do so not as elected officials, not as citizen-legislators, not by and for and of the People, but as an unaccountable elite.

And all they offer in exchange is blood. Preferably somebody else's blood.

They think that it's their right, to make the rest of us live in a nightmare. They don't give a damn who else ends up dead, or living with addiction and PTSD or mourning a generation of dead people because of all this stuff. 'Cause they're sure it won't be them.

And we're already there, and if you can't see why and who's responsible at this point, you just don't want to.

And I guarantee you these people would happily make the situation much worse, if they thought they could get one red cent out of doing so.

There are no accidents with guns.

There are no accidental pushes towards fascism.

These fucking people know what they're doing, even if they're doing it badly.

The question is, why don't you?

We don't just need to kick these fucking people to the curb, we need to break the national foot off in they ass when we do it.

'Cause if we don't, a lot more people are going to die.

They don't care. Do you?